Zoë Kravitz Cries Foul

Was Zoë Kravitz Shut Out Of The Dark Knight Auditions For Being "Urban"?

Zoë Kravitz has been hitting it out of the park for the last couple of years, landing pivotal roles in high profile movies and indie hits alike (if you haven't seen Dope yet, do it. It really is super dope.) However, the daughter of Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz recently stepped forward to talk about a film she was turned away from — for being Black.

"In the last Batman movie, they told me that I couldn't get an audition for a small role they were casting because they weren't 'going urban,'" she spilled to Nylon during an interview in their August 2015 issue. “It was like, ‘What does that have to do with anything?’ I have to play the role like, ‘Yo, what’s up, Batman? What’s going on wit chu?’”

More often than not, Kravitz avoids roles that zero in on race. “I don’t want to play the role of a girl struggling in the ghetto. It’s not that that story isn’t important, but I saw patterns and was like, ‘I don’t relate to these people.’”

We chatted with Kravitz earlier this year about what it's really like to be Black and female in Hollywood today. “What I’ve found," she said at the time, "is that it’s not like someone doesn’t want to hire a person because she’s black …You cast a movie, and they don’t cast a black person, and it wasn’t necessarily on purpose. Writer, directors, they just don’t think about it. Because it’s not their struggle.”

It seems like casting for The Dark Knight didn't go quite that way: They were thinking about it, but decided that race was more important than giving Kravitz a chance to show her stuff. Now that's what we would call a major mistake.